20 Top WordPress Plugins To Improve Readability

WordPress, by default has some good typography features. But still meliorations can be done in a lot of areas. And you can do that meliorations by using the plugins given below.

It totally depends on you how you want your basic text to look in your blog. A plugin for what ever you want to do is preset. There are plugins that let you handle hyphens and long URLS in a better way. Some other plugins let you replace text with images (in headlines or to avoid censorship), or add print-centric elements, like drop caps and pull quotes, to your posts.

So here is the list of 20 great WordPress Typography Plugins to make readability a lot better:

This is a font replacement plugin that lets you replace any font on your WordPress site with a dynamically built picture that has any TrueType or OpenType font you wish. The source code would remain intact, and your site will face no problems with the search engines. The plugin runs on WordPress 2.5 up through 2.8.4.

This plugin allows you to add a customized drop cap to every single post, page, comments and other things, like it is done in print publications. It can also make different kinds of initials. It is tested with WordPress 2.3 up through 2.7.1.

This plugin adds various typography features to your site, including hyphenation, spacing control, forced internal wrapping of long URLs, intelligent character placement, clever handling of quotes and other characters, and CSS hooks for styling ampersands, acronyms, and other special characters.

As the name suggests, this plugin allows you to put pull quotes into your blog posts to put stress on specific sentences or phrases by custom fields. You can also style Pull Quote by editing the included CSS file.

This is a great plugin that can meliorate the usability and accessibility of your site. It has three links to every single page to let visitors to resize the type on that specific page. This fact will make your site a lot more user-friendly for your visitors who can resize the standard type.

This plugin allows the original Google Syntax Highlighter, the one which was developed by Alex Gorbatchev work within WordPress. This highlighter is a totally client-side highlighter and it supports many languages (including Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, XML, HTML, Delphi, CSS and C++ etc), and is very small.

As the name suggests, it replaces all the text in a post with a PNG picture. This plugin can come in handy if you do not want search engines to see your content so you won’t fly under the radar. It bypasses most automated filtering that some countries use to censor internet content.

This plugin lets you bypass automated censorship as ir replaces specific words with picture of the word instead of text. All you have to do is to specify which words do you wish to be replaced and Censortive does everything else on its own. This plugin, like the one above, can come in handy if you do not want search engines to see your content so you won’t fly under the radar.

This plugin does not let WP apply its auto formatting functions to your posts and pages. It also does not let WordPress to strip out tags when you edit in the HTML editor and it also has a positive affect on the way the visual editor formats your posts.

It adds some typography meliorations to your posts all by itself. It has many features like altering dashes with spaces around them to em-dashes, transforming hyphens without spaces to n-dashes, and converting spaces after particular words into non-breaking spaces.

Add footnotes to your posts by using this plugin. It is very easy to use and only all you have to do is to use double-parentheses around your footnote and it will do everything all by itslef. It works with WordPress versions 2.0 through 2.6.

Typography Plugins For Admins

Here are a couple of admin plugins that provide you with more editing options so that you can meliorate your site’s typography .

This plugin adds a host of WYSIWYG options to the normal WP visual editor. It boasts two rows of extra features to your visual editor toolbar. Features like options to apply particular styles and to add and format tables. It’s compatible with WordPress version 2.8 and 2.8.1.

It also adds a WYSIWYG editor that actually displays the page layout of the post within the visual editor. It makes it quite easy to view how your line breaks, images, and other elements will fit on your page.

This amazing plugin provides you with extra options to formatt posts on your WordPress site according to a various syntaxes and encoding options, including Textile 1, Textile 2, and Markdown. It works with WordPress 1.5 and higher.

About the author

With a passion for Knowledge, Smashinghub has been created to explore things like Free Resources For Designers, Photographers, Web Developers and Inspiration.